Television personality and heart surgeon Dr. Oz and his wife are evidently behind the purchase of Louwana, a landmarked 1919 North End house that changed hands last week via an $18 million deed, according to records filed with the Palm Beach County Clerk’s Office.

A three-year, $5 million mortgage on the beachfront house at 473 N. County Road bears the signatures of Mehmet C. Oz, better known simply as Dr. Oz, and his wife, author and television host Lisa Oz, courthouse records show.

Dr. Oz has been a longtime visitor to Palm Beach, where his wife’s family has vacationed for decades, according to a story published several years ago in Palm Beach Life, a publication of the Palm Beach Daily News. Property records show Lisa Oz’s parents, Dr. Gerald and Emily Jane Lemole, own two houses on the island.

Last week’s balloon mortgage was issued by Louwana’s seller — Cristina de Heeren Noble. She is a descendant of the extended family that has owned Louwana since it was designed by noted society architect Addison Mizner nearly a century ago. Built for the Munn-Wanamaker family, the house was one of the earliest commissions in Mizner’s Palm Beach oeuvre.

The deed and the mortgage were recorded Friday by the Palm Beach County Clerk’s Office. Also signing the mortgage was Palm Beach attorney Leslie Evans, acting as trustee of the Louwana Trust, identified as the buyer on the deed. A family trust in the name of Lisa Oz was also a party to the loan, and her sister, Laura Lemole DuPont, signed the mortgage as its trustee.

Related

Evans declined to comment on the sale, and the other parties on the buyer’s side could not be reached.

Nicknamed “America’s Doctor,” Dr. Oz hosts a popular TV program, The Dr. Oz Show, that explores health topics. In 1994, he founded the Cardiovascular Institute and Integrative Medicine Program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He also is a professor at the Department of Surgery at Columbia University and has made regular appearances at health-related events in Palm Beach County. His wife has collaborated with him on television and book projects.

‘Beautiful house’

The 12-bedroom, 12,483-square-foot house is of only a handful of Mizner homes still standing on the North End. Louwana sits on a 1.2-acre lot with 150 feet of oceanfront, a little more than a half-mile south of the Palm Beach Country Club.

Louwana was commissioned by Gurnee Munn and his wife, Marie Louise Wanamaker Munn, whose family started the Wanamaker department store in Philadelphia. The estate took its name from a contraction of her names.

Louwana also was the longtime home of the seller’s parents. Noble’s late mother, Aimee de Heeren, died in 2006, and her father, Rodman Arturo de Heeren, a Wanamaker descendant, died in 1983.

Noble took possession of the house as representative of her mother’s estate in 2008, courthouse records show.

Sotheby’s International Realty agent Cristina Condon acted on behalf of Noble in the deal that closed last week.

“Louwana is in a great location. It’s a charming, beautiful house,” said Condon, who said a confidentiality agreement prevented her from discussing the sale, the seller or the buyer.

On the buyer’s side of last week’s sale was agent Shirley Wyner, of Fite Shavell & Associates, who could not be reached.

Condon initially listed the house in early 2008 at $30 million. In 2013 — the last year it was in MLS — the property was priced at $22 million. The house had been under contract since last year, said Condon. She didn’t provide a reason for the prolonged closing process.

Last week’s sale marked the second time this year that an oceanfront Mizner house changed hands on the North End. In late May, John and Marianne Castle sold the estate known as the “Winter White House” at 1095 N. Ocean Blvd. to Jane Goldman, in a $31 million deal brokered by Lawrence A. Moens Associates. Mizner designed the house in 1923 for Rodman Wanamaker II, who sold it in 1932 to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. The Castles bought it from the Kennedy family in 1995.

Original details

Louwana has four fireplaces, a guest house, a cabana, a tennis court, a three-car garage and extensive gardens, according to its sales listings. Original Mizner details include its so-called “Scheherazade” stairway, cypress ceilings and original blue octagonal tile floors and walls in the upstairs master bathroom

About 40 Mizner homes and commercial buildings remain on the island. Louwana isn’t as grand in scale as some of the mansions the architect designed during the Roaring ’20s. The house has a more informal floor plan, with almost all of the rooms capturing ocean views.

“Every notable visitor or resident of Palm Beach either stayed or was entertained there over the years,” Palm Beach historian Augustus Mayhew said in a 2008 article in the Daily News.

After it suffered damage in the powerful 1928 hurricane, the house was altered by Maurice Fatio’s firm. The main entrance was moved from the east side to the south. Fatio also designed a new pool, loggia and tennis house.

“Still, it is the most original and earliest remaining residential work of Palm Beach’s signature architect, Addison Mizner,” Mayhew said in the Daily News story.

The town granted the house landmark status in 1980.

Ongoing lawsuit

Louwana had lately been involved in a dispute between Noble and her second cousin, Christopher Kellogg. He owns The Lodge, a house he shares with his wife, Vicki, at 455 N. County Road, immediately west of Louwana. Both properties were part of their families’ original land holdings, as was Amado, a third house that stands south of the two homes.

The lawsuit is ongoing, despite the sale of the house, confirmed Palm Beach attorney Paul Rampell, who is representing Noble. He declined to comment further about the case.

In September, the Architectural Commission agreed, at the Kelloggs’ request, to defer for the second time consideration of a project to move an existing service drive on the east side of their property.

Popular in Business

Reader Comments
...

Next Up in Real Estate Channel

Mutual funds pioneer Charles “Chuck” M. Royce and his wife, Deborah, whose lakefront house late last year won a Ballinger Award, have sold their other Palm Beach house across town to its next-door neighbor for a recorded $8.9 million. Kenneth W. and Claudia J. Silverman bought the house at 830 S. County Road, according to the deed...

In Palm Beach, land and dreams go hand in hand. And along those lines, longtime Palm Beach homebuilder and developer Dan Swanson and his wife, Karen, have taken an unusual tack in updating their marketing for the property in Phipps Estate, where they have lived for years. With their recent re-listing of 205 Via Tortuga in the MLS, the couple has included...

Palm Beach real estate brokers are revving up for what traditionally is their busiest weekend of the year, the high point of the winter season when house hunters get driven to properties in freshly detailed Mercedes-Benzes and Range Rovers by agents eager to ink deals. And this Presidents Day weekend promises to have an actual president in town, with...

Broker Christian Angle of Christian J. Angle Real Estate has given his sales listing for a Palm Beach mega-mansion a visual update with photographs showing rooms furnished for the first time. The never-lived-in oceanfront home at 1071 N. Ocean Blvd. is for sale at $64.9 million in the Palm Beach Board of Realtors Multiple Listing...

A never-lived-in house on an ocean-to-lake estate at 900 S. Ocean Blvd. in Manalapan has sold for a recorded $24 million, about a year after a larger home built next door by the same developer changed hands for $3 million more. The buyer was a limited liability company with a New York City address associated in public records with Solil Management...